I am not sure where to start my biography, because so many things have happened in my life. Most people would probably tell me to start at the beginning. But I don’t really even know where the beginning is. Was it before I was born? Was it when I was born? Was it at eighteen months, when I started reading? With this puzzle in mind, I don’t think I will even start at the beginning.

Damer is a founding director of the Contact Consortium, a Silicon Valley based non profit research membership organization dedicated to the development of inhabited multi-user virtual worlds hosted on the Internet. The Consortium has an extensive corporate and institutional membership base and a number of active special interest groups. The Consortium hosts many innovative conferences and other special events and presentations worldwide. Recent Consortium research and development projects undertaken include the collaborative construction and staffing of a virtual town , a virtual university and architecture competition and a virtual garden world.

An evolutionary theorist and biologist, chiefly known for his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins is the inventor of the term “meme”.

Richard Dawkins was educated at Oxford University and has taught zoology at the universities of California and Oxford. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His books about evolution and science also include The Extended… read more

Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis, 63, has lived in 7 countries. He recently retired from his role of Director of the Artificial Brain Lab (ABL) at Xiamen University, China, where he was building China’s first artificial brain. He and his friend Prof. Dr. Ben Goertzel have just finished guest editing a special issue on artificial brains for Neurocomputing journal (December 2010), the first of its kind on the planet.… read more

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process.

He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging.

He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was… read more

William A. Dembski is Research Professor in Philosophy at Southwestern Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute, and author of The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). His essay, "Kurzweil’s Impoverished Spiritualty" appears in Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong AI (Discovery Institute, 2002).

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon &Schuster, 1995), is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normal Superieur in Paris.

The late Michael Dertouzos was Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) since 1974. For more than a quarter century, the Lab has been at the forefront of the computer revolution. Its members and alumni have been instrumental in the invention of such innovations as time-shared computers, RSA encryption, the Spreadsheet, the NuBus, the X-Window system, the ARPAnet and the Internet. The Lab is currently home to the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations led by the Web’s inventor.

David Despain is a science and health journalist based in Chandler, Arizona. He is originally from Provo, Utah. He earned a Master’s degree in human nutrition from the University of Bridgeport and, previously, a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Illinois @ Springfield. His writing has appeared in a number of newspapers, magazines and Web sites.

Devlin has a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from King’s College London (1968) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Bristol (1971).
He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University’s H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI.

He is a regular contributor to NPR’s popular magazine program Weekend Edition (where he is known as “the Math… read more

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties.… read more

He received his B.A. from St. Louis University in 1976 and, in 1979, began working as a respiratory therapist in intensive care units. After traveling for over a year in Europe and Africa, he went back to law school at St. Louis University, where he was editor in chief of the Law Journal.… read more

Eric Drexler is a researcher, author, and policy advocate focused on emerging technologies and their consequences for the future. Noting that technological advances have caused some of the deepest transformations in human history, he studies emerging technologies with the power to cause future global transformations. Rather than concentrating solely on the immediate laboratory aspects of emerging technologies, where many scientists work in an array of narrow fields, Eric Drexler has chosen to focus on longer-term developments and their potential economic and social consequences, a broad area often neglected or overshadowed in the study of technological change. An advocate of long-term perspectives in policymaking, Eric writes and lectures widely on the implications of emerging technologies for our future. He is presently Chief Technical Advisor of Nanorex, a company developing software for the design and simulation of molecular machine systems.… read more